Identifying appropriate interruption-handling strategies during healthcare care processes

Interruptions are a salient component of healthcare care work. While there is a significant amount of literature studying interruptions in inpatient care, most of it focuses on retrospectively assessing their frequency and impact on processes. Strategies to address interruptions often do not completely eliminate them. There is a need to identify strategies that can be proactively used by practitioners to address the interruptions they face during care. This article describes an analysis of the potential effects of interruptions at different stages of a primary task (patient assessment). An Interruption-Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (I-FMEA), where interruption-related failure modes are evaluated in terms of risk, worker efficiency, and patient satisfaction, is proposed. This approach helps to identify interruptions that could be postponed (i.e., representing relatively low-risk, average impact on patient satisfaction, and average added work). It also helps to identify higher-risk tasks that should always be finished before addressing any interruption. The strategies identified in this research depend on the specific primary task, type of interruption, and performance metric to optimize. The proposed approach can be used to identify general recommendations when the provider lacks experience. It can be adapted to analyze other primary tasks and their associated interruptions.